‘After many years I had excised myself from the life I had led in town, just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo. Abashed by the harm I had wreaked on the picture left behind, and unsure where the cut-out might end up next, I lived a provisional existence. I did so in a place where I knew none of my neighbours, where the street names, views, smells and faces were all unfamiliar to me, in a cheaply appointed flat where I would be able to lay my life aside for a while.’ In River, a woman moves to a London suburb for reasons that are unclear. She takes long, solitary walks by the River Lea, observing and describing her surroundings and the unusual characters she encounters. Over the course of these wanderings she amasses a collection of found objects and photographs and is drawn into reminiscences of the different rivers which haunted the various stages of her life, from the Rhine, where she grew up, to the Saint Lawrence, the Hooghly, and the banks of the Oder. Written in language that is as precise as it is limpid, River is a remarkable novel, full of poignant images and poetic observations, an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human.

Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four women-seventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hanna's daughter Anna-are ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the local train station. They are given thirty minutes-the "wild expulsions" of Sudeten Germans have begun. But where is Anna? Witnessing the revenge lynching of SS and suspected collaborators on her walk home, she arrives in Komotau to find her family gone. The trek takes the older women via Munich, then Dresden and Magdeburg, to an outpost in the far northwest of the Soviet zone where they settle as farm laborers. Once united again, their hope of one day returning to the heimat-homeland-is both a source of strength and a burden, choking attachments to new surroundings and neighbors. This conflict will prove to be the story of their lives, as well as both the joy and ruin of Anna's son. A tale of four generations told in Reinhard Jirgl's unique and subversively expressive idiom, The Unfinished plays out between the ruins of Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of communist East Germany, the birth of the Berlin Republic, and the shadow of a new millennium.

A powerful performance text that illuminates incidents of anti-immigrant violence in contemporary Germany. Between 1998 and 2007 a series of killings in Germany, disdainfully styled "doner murders" by the media, were attributed by German police to internecine rivalries among immigrants. The victims included eight citizens of Turkish origin, a Greek citizen, and a German policewoman. Not until 2011 did the German public learn not only that the police had ignored signs pointing to the real perpetrators, a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Underground, but also that important files, possibly containing evidence implicating state agencies, had disappeared from the archives of Federal Police and intelligence organizations. Esther Dischereit, one of the preeminent German-Jewish voices of the post-Holocaust generation, takes that failure of the state to protect its citizens from racist violence as the core of her performance text Flowers for Otello: On the Crimes That Came Out of Jena. Seeking an appropriate language with which to meet the bereaved, she also finds a way to raise the blanket of silence that is used by those who would prefer that we forget. Combining witness testimony, myth, and incidents from a history of violence against minorities, Flowers for Otello, in Iain Galbraith's translation, refuses chaos, instead revealing the chilling, patterned order of tragedy while bringing a great writer's humanism to the fore.

A profound novel detailing the brutal legacy of Nazism on four generations of a family in Germany. Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four women—seventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hanna’s daughter Anna—are ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the local train station. They are given thirty minutes—the “wild expulsions� of Sudeten Germans have begun. But where is Anna?   Witnessing the revenge lynching of SS and suspected collaborators on her walk home, she arrives in Komotau to find her family gone. The trek takes the older women via Munich, then Dresden and Magdeburg, to an outpost in the far northwest of the Soviet zone where they settle as farm laborers. Once united again, their hope of one day returning to the heimat—homeland—is both a source of strength and a burden, choking attachments to new surroundings and neighbors. This conflict will prove to be the story of their lives, as well as both the joy and ruin of Anna’s son.   A tale of four generations told in Reinhard Jirgl’s unique and subversively expressive idiom, The Unfinished plays out between the ruins of Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of communist East Germany, the birth of the Berlin Republic, and the shadow of a new millennium.  

Max Weber famously described politics as “a strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and judgment.� Taking this as his inspiration, Alexander Kluge brings readers yet another literary masterpiece. Drilling through Hard Boards is a kaleidoscopic meditation on the tools available to those who struggle for power. Weber’s metaphorical drill certainly embodies intelligent tenacity as a precondition for political change. But what is a hammer in the business of politics, Kluge wonders, and what is a subtle touch? Eventually, we learn that all questions of politics lead to a single one: what is political in the first place? In the book, Kluge masterfully unspools more than one hundred vignettes, through which it becomes clear that the political is more often than not personal. Politics are everywhere in our everyday lives, so along with the stories of major political figures, we also find here the small, mostly unknown ones: Elfriede Eilers alongside Pericles, Chilean miners next to Napoleon, a three-month-old baby beside Alexander the Great. Drilling through Hard Boards is not just Kluge’s newest fiction, it is a masterpiece of political thought.

Whether in poetry, fiction, radio drama or sound installations, Esther Dischereit's work represents a unique departure in recent European writing: a distinctive, off-beat syntax of German-Jewish intimacy with the fractured consciousness and deeply rutted cultural landscape of today's Germany. Sometimes a Single Leaf, mirroring the development of Esther Dischereit's poetry across three decades, includes selections from three of her books as well as a sampling of more recent, uncollected poems. It is her first book of poetry in English translation. "From these splinters, flowers bloom: where the dead lie, trees grow and we must walk among them. In these poems, Esther Dischereit, whose mother was one of the few who survived the Holocaust in hiding within Nazi Germany, lays the present over the past with piercing effect." Preti Taneja, author of Wir, die wir jung sind

Ulrike Draesner is recognised as one of Germany's most important living poets, as well as being an original and daring writer of fiction. Her poetic language, recorded where breath and script meet, can unsettle conventional reading modalities: its orthography refuses to capitalize; its punctuation— if the stops and starts may be called that — is rarely executed by comma or period; its sequentialities, shunning the comfort of bespoke narrative, undermining the reliability of marching lines and subaltern clauses, are born at the intersection of worldly impulse and bodily pulse, vulnerable to the loops of memory. Her writing favours an exchange with the reader that explores unfamiliar modes of encountering the world to form the sociable space of a poem. Her work is charged with a delicious, inquisitive restlessness. Visually acute, her poems are keen to discover, reflect on and body forth complex blendings of thought, sound, smell and image, delivering a revealing diffraction to the reader's ear.

In this masterful first book of original poems, Iain Galbraith explores how people's actions and experiences shape not only their own lives but the world around them. His poems are full of sharp observations and a level of detail which ground the reader in whichever world he presents, and while the settings vary from the mundane to the epic the language never fails to retain a sense of the fantastical. Through his words Galbraith is able to to take us on an emotional journey through love, grief, hope and discontent. After years of experience writing and translating poetry, The True Height of the Ear acts as evidence of Galbraith's comfort in writing in a variety of different styles, creating a book of poems which consistently entice his readers.

"A splendid addition to an already extraordinary oeuvre."--Teju Cole, "The New Yorker"
German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of "Austerlitz, "the prose classic of World War II culpability and conscience that put its author in the company of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges. Now comes the first major collection of this literary master's poems. Skillfully translated by Iain Galbraith, they range from pieces Sebald wrote as a student in the sixties to those completed right before his untimely death in 2001. In nearly one hundred poems--the majority published in English for the first time--Sebald explores his trademark themes, from nature and history, to wandering and wondering, to oblivion and memory. Soaring and searing, the poetry of W. G. Sebald is an indelible addition to his superb body of work, and this collection is bound to become a classic in its own right.
"How fortunate we are to have this writer's startling imagination freshly on display once again, expressed in language honed to a perfect simplicity."--Billy Collins
"A watershed volume . . . nothing less than transcendent."--"BookPage"
" Sebald was] a defining writer of his era."--"The New Republic"

Alfred Kolleritsch was born in Brunnsee, Austria in 1931, and now lives in Graz. He concluded his studies of Philosophy and German with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger. He is perhaps best-known as the president of the "Forum Stadtpark" in Graz, a role he has fulfilled since 1968, and as the co-founder and editor of the literary magazine, "manuskripte," a pioneering journal. His own work, which consists of prose and poetry, has won several awards, including the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry (2005). This is the first selection of his work in English and brings before the English-speaking public one of the major figures in contemporary Austrian writing.

In this masterful first book of original poems, Iain Galbraith explores how people's actions and experiences shape not only their own lives but the world around them. His poems are full of sharp observations and a level of detail which ground the reader in whichever world he presents, and while the settings vary from the mundane to the epic the language never fails to retain a sense of the fantastical. Through his words Galbraith is able to to take us on an emotional journey through love, grief, hope and discontent. After years of experience writing and translating poetry, The True Height of the Ear acts as evidence of Galbraith's comfort in writing in a variety of different styles, creating a book of poems which consistently entice his readers.